Four Friday

1. Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi gets slammed for arm-chair reporting on GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann - and the word "plagiarism" gets thrown about. City Paper

2. People like Andy Carvin and NPR wants to capitalize on that. Nieman Journalism Lab

3. Gene Weingarten skewers self-branding and journalists patronizing their readers. Washington Post

4. A Patch reporter doesn't break a story. fishbowlLA

Pulitzer winner plagiarizes at Washington Post (*updated)

 The Washington Post has apologized in an editor's note for a case of "substantial" plagiarism in two of its stories. In both, passages were lifted from the Arizona Republic. The author of the reports, Sari Horwitz, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, received a three-month suspension, Washington Post media writer Paul Farhi has reported.

Patch, Patch, Patch

AOL's Patch network hit 750 today - that's 750 individual Patch sites now running across the country. It's up from 500 in early December and up from 30 at the start of the year. I'm told the rapid roll out earned some top managers their holiday bonuses, and that some Patchers worried quality could suffer in the furious effort to meet the goal.

At least AOL realized that the mini-plagiarism outbreak needed a response. A reliable source tells me Patch editors will get mandatory plagiarism-prevention training.

And since I've gotten into a one-way argument with the LA Weekly over all this, here's another thought:

While the Weekly likes to describe Patch as the WalMart of news, I think it risks becoming like a fast-food chain - each franchise operated locally but serving a narrow menu of nearly identical content and dictated to by national headquarters. Think of AOL as the McDonald's Corp. of information and each Patch site as a local joint. Different kids in the play yard, but every Happy Meal the same.

Now, AOL's stated goal is to let individual editors cater to their local communities using only a common platform. Editors are expected to tailor content to local readers, not follow a single AOL formula; and if AOL can resist top-down meddling, and encourage bottom-up innovation, then the network might avoid the fast-food stamp.

But AOL will inevitably count hits and ad dollars and wonder why some site are doing better than others. Being the conglomerate that it is, AOL will think conformity is the best prescription for uneven performance. When controversy strikes - lawsuits, boycotts, plagiarism, etc. - AOL will be tempted to craft one-size-fits-all edicts that will, over time, narrow the menu to the things that work best - i.e., draw the most traffic at the lowest cost.

Of course, news stories aren't Happy Meals and different cities will always have different issues to cover. The best editors at the best Patch sites will resist the mothership. But I haven't seen a newspaper chain yet that hasn't consolidated and embraced sameness as a way to cuts costs in tough times. If Patch can buck the trend, that would be something special.

Another black eye for Patch

A stringer for AOL's Patch site in Palo Alto got caught poaching a business report from the website VentureBeat. The Palo Alto Patch acknowledged what had happened in an apology to readers.

Patch sites in West Hollywood and New Rochelle, New York have run into problems with stolen content as well, as FishbowlLA has reported.

The Patch network is largely decentralized, with individual editors running city sites under a regional editor. The model calls for the local editors (some of whom having journalism training, some of whom don't) to hire stringers (some of whom have journalism training, some of whom don't) to help produce content and keep the web pages filled. It's a system that invites people to cut corners.

As I just argued in the post below, Patch sites should not be graded on a curve - no excuses for plagiarism, no pats on the back for doing what they promised to do. But it only takes a few rotten apples to spoil the barrel. So AOL better get its shit together - it owes it to the Patch writers and editors who are doing a good job.

(found via FishbowlLA)

Cooks Source got pwned

"Cooks Source steals your wallet then helps you look for it!"
"Cooks Source thought the walkie-talkies were a nice touch in the re-release of E.T."

These are two of hundreds of snark bombs (some funnier than others) lodged at Cooks Source's former Facebook page after the food magazine's publisher, Judith Griggs, told a food blogger that she could lift an entire recipe and republish it for free because "everything on the Internet is in the public domain," the Los Angeles Times reports.

Here's a little more background from the Times story:

Food blogger Monica Gaudio found out that Cooks Source published a piece that she wrote about apple pie, but did not get her permission to do so. Gaudio contacted the publication, half expecting it to be some kind of unfortunate mix-up, and asked for a nominal sum of money as compensation. That's when Griggs -- or someone using her e-mail address -- responded, blasting Gaudio for even raising the issue: "... honestly Monica, the web is considered 'public domain' and you should be happy we just didn't 'lift' your whole article and put someone else's name on it!"

It gets worse. The e-mail continues that not only would Gaudio not be getting paid, but that Gaudio should have paid her for the editing work she had to put into the piece.

This didn't sit well with bloggers and others, who hijacked the Facebook page today. As of this moment, the Cooks Source page has 4,223 "likes" - the overwhelming majority dislike Cooks Source.

Four in the morning

1. The Washington Post hearts the Huffington Post's content model. Nieman Journalism Lab

2. NBC 4 in LA has launched a new web project called "Prop Zero" that bills itself as the Ground Zero for change in California politics. Joe Mathews of the New America Foundation is a contributor. Prop Zero

3. The danger of plagiarism in the reTweet. Good

4. A lengthy piece in the New York Times Magazine about the emerging business models for online news... It looks like the lifestyle of a starving actor trying to break into the movies: lots of work for low (or no) pay and, in the end, the audience gets to decide who's talented enough to rise to the top. NYT Magazine

Not plagiarism, just mixed up

Back in the olden days, when a writer took an author's words and pretended they were his own it was called plagiarism. Helene Hegemann, a 17-year-old writer in Germany has, with the ascent of some book critics, redefined this act of wrongdoing as one of authenticity.

A blogger first uncovered the fact that Hegemann's "Axolotl Roadkill" contained whole passages taken from another book called "Strobo." Hegemann's novel is up for a $20,000 prize at the Leipzig Book Fair.

From the New York Times:

Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

An ingenious defense. "Originality" doesn't exist, but "authenticity," a word whose very meaning depends on the concept of being true to the original ("not false or imitation"), does.

Journalist Gerald Posner, who had to step down from his gig at the Daily Beast after acknowledging he had plagiarized the Miami Herald, will be pleased to know that he was actually being authentic by taking someone else's words. And the person who wrote the words he lifted was apparently unoriginal.

Extreme parallel construction

Let's follow the trail of a Feb. 6 press release from the office of San Bernardino County Supervisor Paul Biane.

Here's the first paragraph of the "news" release as posted on Feb. 6 on the San Bernardino Sun/Daily Bulletin breaking news blog:

Members of a recently formed public benefit corporation visited legislators and policy makers in Washington, D.C. this week to educate them about their efforts to tackle the Inland Empire's foreclosure and economic woes.

Here's the first paragraph of a Feb. 6 article "submitted by" David Zook on a site called BestSyndicationNews.com:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Members of a recently formed public benefit corporation visited legislators and policy makers in Washington, D.C. this week to educate them about their efforts to tackle the Inland Empire’s foreclosure and economic woes.

Here's the first paragraph of a Feb. 7 copyrighted column by Michael Neufeld on a site called RimoftheWorld.net:

Washington, D.C. – Members of a recently formed public benefit corporation visited legislators and policy makers in Washington, D.C. this week. The purpose of this visit was to educate them about their efforts to tackle the Inland Empire's foreclosure and economic woes.

Here's the first paragraph of a Feb. 16 story posted on ChinoHills.com under the byline of "Joe A":

Members of a recently formed public benefit corporation visited legislators and policy makers in Washington, D.C. this week to educate them about their efforts to tackle the Inland Empire's foreclosure and economic woes.

The dramatic coincidences in sentence construction and word choice can be found in each of the succeeding paragraphs as well.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Wikirealpolitik

Apparently John McCain knows how to use the Internet after all. Taegen Goddard's Political Insider notes some similarities between passages in McCain's speech on the Georgia crisis and passages in the Wikipedia entry on Georgia.

Texas alt-weekly folds

Shortly after Slate.com exposed what appears to be a brazen, unapologetic and long-lasting bout of plagiarism at The Bulletin of Montgomery County, Texas, the paper's publisher, Mike Ladyman, decided to fold the publication rather than face more scrutiny.

In an interview with the Houston Press, Ladyman criticizes Slate writer Jody Rosen for bringing the plagiarism to his attention in an inconvenient and unpleasant manner:

Other than the three articles Rosen showed him in June, the three that he took down off the web, Ladyman says Rosen never showed him any other examples of plagiarism in the Bulletin before publishing his attack online. Ladyman doesn’t consider this an honorable course of action.

“If I would have had the opportunity to look at any of these things, I would have not only pulled them down, I would have apologized, I would have written a written apology and I wouldn’t have been working with Mark anymore."

The "Mark" Ladyman refers to is Mark Williams, the writer whose byline accompanies all of the offending articles. While due diligence is not one of Ladyman's strong suits, he did at one point confront Williams with some of the evidence of plagiarism:

“When I contacted Mark about it he said that’s what was in the press releases they sent me. I know in today’s day and age, and I know maybe they shouldn’t, but I do understand what writers do and they do tend to maybe use too much of the PR that’s fed to them,” Ladyman says.

In other words, Williams didn't steal original work, he merely stole press releases. Though this form of plagiarism may be less troubling to Ladyman, Rosen's article makes quite clear the plagiarism went much further than "too much of the PR".

Williams penned his own bitter letter to Rosen that's also included in the Houston Press story. In it, Williams blames the Slate writer for using his big city skills to knock a poor rube from his tenuous hold on the writing life. Here's an excerpt:

It must have taken years of seasoned investigative know-how to push me off my lofty perch. It takes a dogged, intrepid journalist to expose the alleged wrongdoings of a 44-year-old college dropout who drifted from one lousy media job to another for 20 years; it takes courage to debase someone with a mouthful of cut-rate dentures who, up until 2007, lived in his parents’ home for seven years due to near-fatal bouts of clinical depression; it takes a journalist of a certain caliber to torpedo a pathetic hack who has barely squeezed out a living for nearly a decade at seven cents a word.

I wrote that (Updated)

There's plagiarism and then there's plagiarism.

As Slate's Jody Rosen found out, The Bulletin, a small alt-weekly in Montgomery County, Texas, appears to have perfected the second kind - a wholesale theft of words. Indeed, a quick check of the first music review I came across from Music Editor Mark Williams looks an awful lot like this.

The paper is part of the Alternative Weekly Network, a California nonprofit that coordinates ad buys for 110 weeklies nationwide, including the Pasadena Weekly and LA CityBeat (there is nothing to indicate these papers are following in The Bulletin's dubious footsteps).

To join AWN, a paper must publish weekly, "carry no more than 75% advertising content, and no more than 33% non-local material." It's hard to imagine the paper is meeting the last requirement.

In an email, AWN Executive Director Mark Hanzlik says he hasn't done business with The Bulletin "in years" and indicated its membership could be in jeopardy.

Update: Hanzlik now says The Bulletin is not a member of the Alternative Weekly Network. Although a link to the paper appears on the cooperative's Web site (here), Hanzlik says some of the papers make the list simply because the network has placed ads with them in the past.

Hanzlik explains: "It's a bit confusing, but the bottom line is we align ourselves with members, they govern our cooperative network and we're proud to say they're members. The others on the list are simply titles where we may have placed ads."

He adds: "I'm appalled at the editorial practices of this free community weekly in Conroe, but not surprised. We haven't seen a full issue of The Bulletin in many years."